Wireless communication devices (WCDs), such as mobile telephones, portable computers with wireless communication cards, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable media players, or other flash memory devices with wireless communication capabilities, are typically powered by limited battery resources. Improved battery life and battery life conservation are, therefore, of paramount concern when designing WCDs. The concern for battery life is offset, however, by demands by users for increased use of multimedia applications on WCDs and transferring multimedia content over a multimedia interface between WCDs and display devices.
Multimedia applications on a WCD can be displayed and/or played back on external devices by transferring multimedia content between the WCD and the external devices via multimedia interfaces. Typically, a multimedia interface with content protection, e.g. High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), is utilized to ensure secure transmission of content between devices to prevent unauthorized users from receiving the content. The content protection requires additional processing for authentication, revocation, encryption, and link integrity checks. The processing associated with receiving and/or creating multimedia content on WCDs in addition to the processing associated with content protection when multimedia content is transmitted using multimedia interfaces with content protection consumes a significant amount of power.